Alan Smith talks to three of the squad from the last unlikely English league
champions, Brian Clough's 1977-78 side

Alan Smith Well, it’s been 38 years since Nottingham Forest won the First Division title in their first season after promotion. Would a Leicester City triumph represent the biggest shock since?

Garry Birtles Definitely. I didn’t think we’d ever see this kind of thing happen again. For so long, four or five of the big clubs have had it all their own way. And it’s great for East Midlands football.

I’d love to see a club from this area come out on top … as long as it’s not Derby!

Frank Clark Even if Leicester don’t win the league, they’re virtually certain to finish in the top four. It’s going to be an amazing achievement. Incredible.

John Robertson It’s not just this season either. It’s the calendar year, when you look at it from last January. So Nigel Pearson deserves a lot of credit.

Gary Birtles, Frank Clark and John Robetson see similarities between their Forest champions and Leicester

In your time, there was that whole thing about the bubble bursting, the suspicion you wouldn’t be able to keep it up. The talk in the media went on for months. But I’m not sure people are thinking this way about Leicester now. It seems to have gone beyond that.

GB It has, after those wins over Liverpool and Manchester City. Especially City. They absolutely dismantled the bookies’ favourites. It was interesting listening to Jamie Vardy talking about team spirit and how good it is there. That’s how it was with us. We always stuck together.

The three amigos remember Forest's team spirit fondly

Was there a moment in that ‘77/78 season when you thought, ‘Hold on a minute, we can actually win this’?

JR I think the game in December when we beat Man United 4-0 – that’s when it started to sink in that we could go all the way. I remember John O’Hare being very confident from an early stage but I wasn’t so sure until that game at Old Trafford.

Robertson holds court

Everyone’s talking about Vardy’s non-league background but you came through that route too, didn’t you Gaz? Bought from Long Eaton.

GB Well, it was incredible. I came off a building site, signed for £2,000 and three years later I’d won the European Cup, the Super Cup, the League Cup and been voted European Young Player of the Year. I also won something called the Roy of the Rovers award. For some reason, Trevor Francis presented it to me dressed as Santa Claus. Coming from non-league, I just felt so privileged. I’d been used to grafting on building sites in the middle of winter, inhaling the glue they used to stick down the skirting boards with. It was quite a change.

If Vardy is Leicester's Birtles, Mahrez is their Robertson

So if you’re Jamie Vardy Gaz, you’re Riyad Mahrez Robbo!

JR Everyone I talk to speaks very highly of him. Like me, he’s a winger with a very strong left foot. The key is keeping players like him at the club. Vardy, I hear, has signed a new contract. They’ve got to tie Mahrez down, too.

Archie Gemmill, Martin O'Neill and Robertson form a wall

You coached at Leicester, John, under Martin O’Neill, your old Forest team-mate. And you enjoyed some great times there, the most successful in Leicester’s history up until now.

JR What Martin did was really brilliant. We won two League Cups, got into Europe, finished in the top 10 every year. We thought that was as far as the club could go. But this is just extraordinary. To be fighting for the league championship in the middle of February? Incredible.

Clough runs through the lyrics of We Got the Whole World in Our Hands en route to the recording studio

Apart from team spirit, do you see other similarities between Leicester and your Forest side?

GB I do to a certain extent, yes. Look at the centre-halves – Robert Huth and Wes Morgan. Just like our two, Kenny Burns and Larry Lloyd, they don’t complicate things. Remember what Brian Clough used to say about central defenders? Just head it and kick it and anything else is a bonus. Huth and Morgan are a bit like that. They’ve been superb.

The dynamic duo

And the Foxes, in general, are getting plenty of praise. But it wasn’t always the case with you lot, was it? There seemed to be an unwillingness in some quarters to properly recognise your achievements. Did you ever get the hump?

FC We’ve been getting the hump ever since! But seriously, I don’t think the national press gave us due recognition.

JR Look, you know, Alan. Your Arsenal team won the league twice. We won the league and two European Cups. You’re far from ordinary if you’re doing that kind of thing. Because of the focus on Cloughie, who, let’s get it right, was a superstar, I think he overshadowed the players.

Champions of Europe

And you’re not even in the English Football Hall of Fame. How on earth does that happen?

FC I’ve been trying to get recognition for several years now. It may be that we will get inducted now that the film, I Believe in Miracles, has reminded people of our exploits. But it should have happened years ago.

Vardy, like Birtles, was a non-League recruit

You also had to adjust to European football with all its different styles and challenges. How did that go?

JR Well, we played Liverpool in the first round so obviously it wasn’t such a change. But we faced AEK Athens after that where firecrackers and all sorts was going off.

GB Oh yes, that was when there was a power cut and the lights went out in the hotel. Viv [Anderson] was found shaking in the toilet because his room-mate, Tony Woodcock, had wound him up with all sorts of stories about the local fans attacking us.

FC With those European ties, though, we would never do any work on the opposition. When we played Malmo in the ’79 final, one of my best friends had worked over there and knew all about their team. He sent me a report. For two weeks I ummed and ahhed about giving Cloughie this information. In the end I did. He grabbed the piece of paper and threw it in the bin. “We don’t need that,” he said. “We’ll beat them anyway.”

Clough is celebrated in bronze in Nottingham

And how true were all those stories about Cloughie encouraging you to drink?

FC I know that was the image but it wasn’t like we were a team of boozers. We were very fit. You had to be to play the number of games we did during a season. I think we only used 16 or 17 players in that ’77/78 campaign.

JR Before the ‘79 League Cup final against Southampton, we checked into our London hotel and Cloughie told us to all get back downstairs in 10 minutes. When we did, there were bottles and bottles of champagne lined up. You could have had anything. Then Cloughie and Peter Taylor start regaling us with tales of their time at Hartlepools United. It was absolutely hilarious. Anyway, the next day, we’re one down at half-time. Rubbish, we’d been, after feeling the effects of the night before. The gaffer didn’t say much, apart from warning us not to blame the drink. “Just get back out there,” he said, “and put it right.” We ended up winning 3-2.

FC Years later I asked Cloughie why he allowed us to have a drink the night before a cup final. He said that he and Peter had seen us getting off the coach and we looked far too tense. They knew they had to do something to make us relax.

JR After the European Cup final against Hamburg the gaffer wouldn’t even let us out. For once, I bit back, saying the decision was outrageous. “Shut up,” he says, “or I’ll come over there and thump you.” As it happens, some of us still went out. I think Cloughie knew but never said a word.

GB And how incredible was it that five players who were already there when the gaffer arrived went on to win two European Cups each?

FC And most of them weren’t even in the team before. It was Cloughie’s genius that turned them into winners. Every manager needs a bit of luck and Brian had that with the players he inherited. But he still had a lot of work to do with them. They had the ability but weren’t realising it.